Student Info
Name: Christina Jacildo
Major: Drama, Theatre & Dance
Year: 2010
From: Native New Yorker
Why QC: It was closer to where I live, and they had a dance program with tap dance classes
“Dancing with the feet is one thing, but dancing with the heart is another.”
– Christina Jacildo
Past Profiles
Her effervescent spirit energizing every step, Christina Jacildo ’10 envisions a future in performance. “Life’s a stage for me,” says the 24-year-old who rhapsodizes about dancing and “being around people I love.”
Jacildo’s joy bubbles up through many media. She contributes reviews and articles to May Pang’s Asian Media Internet News. “When I write, I’m very opinionated,” she observes. “I like to make my writing fun.” Urged by friends to become a DJ for online Asian radio, she delighted in telling “the stories of my life.”
A tap dancer since kindergarten, ever since then Jacildo has been choreographing personal experience into narrative art. “I’m a very happy person. Usually my dances are very happy,” she says. At a dance school, she taught tap and jazz to young teens. At Queens College she created dances for peers and faculty, and tap danced in Anything Goes. For one class, the drama, theatre, and dance major created a lyrical piece (with some jazz elements) in memory of her grandmother in Texas, whose dying wish was that her granddaughter complete college.
There was little doubt in Jacildo’s mind that she would graduate, even when she took a year off to sort through careers. After her sophomore year at Lehman College, she transferred to QC. While convincing her parents, who immigrated from the Philippines, that medicine, computer science, and accounting really weren’t for her, she got their permission to study dance. She felt sure she was exemplifying another of her parents’ expectations for their only child: to make good decisions.
Jacildo will spend the coming year in South Korea, where she will tutor and perhaps teach dance and review concerts. “I want to make an impact on people,” she says.
Musical tastes: “If you let me listen to something new—classical, pop, even grunge—I’ll learn to like it,” Jacildo says. She’s also fond of “old school stuff—I’m a big Beatles fan.” East Asian pop is her favorite, especially Korean boy bands.
Surprising fact: Through Twitter, Jacildo landed a chance to take “a Japanese celebrity”—DJ U-Ichi from the hip-hop band Home Made Kazoku—to lunch in New York.